Just letting you all know, I did not renew the pollensonata.com domain this year. Instead I moved the site to pollensonata.moogle.dk. Same site, new URL.
It has been almost a year since I wrote my last blog post! I better write something interesting right away.
I’ll write about hidden object games, because I have been playing those a lot during the last year. Before that, I actually thought of them as irrelevant games in a larger perspective. Sure, they were popular and all, but did they bring our medium forward? No way, I thought – maybe even backwards. They were like dumped down adventure games. Adventure games without puzzles – and without hours of walking around not being able to figure out what to do, until you finally get that big eureka moment when you solve the problem. Instead you are mindlessly staring at pictures looking for hidden objects, which are actually quite easy to find if you have just a little patience. But I have started to realize that these games are not irrelevant at all. They are slowly teaching a new generation of gamers how to play adventure games. These days, there are hidden object games with inventories and puzzles similar to those in adventure games (combine these, use this, turn that etc.), and the stories are often just as important as in an adventure game. I don’t think it will be long before the last missing ingredient – the “walking around between scenes with your avatar” element is added to a hidden object game, and when that happens we are really close to a big time revival of the adventure game genre.
Captain Cloudenhower is a retired steam engineer known mostly for the invention of ionized steam. These days he lives among the clouds in his self build airship, The Duke – powered by his own invention of course. Only the birds know of his current adventures, though rumors tell of the discovery of floating islands and a new moon.
Click the image to see it in high resolution. It is my latest Lego creation. I figured I might as well start taking pictures of these.
I have been busy with work lately, and as so many times before I forgot to use my blog. Playing Valkyria Chronicles though, inspired to write something not work related.
For those who don’t know about the game, it’s a Japanese RPG of the tactical kind. A rather linear structure brings the player through an amazing story and lots of perfectly designed and varied turn-based battles. What I found beautiful about the game, was not only the tear inducing story, the likable characters and the original battle mechanics, but also the way the themes of the story are woven into the reward systems in the game. The most clear example being that mercy is rewarded. The player is encouraged to have sympathy for the enemy foot soldiers through the story sequences, and in the battles shooting at them sounds harsh and hurting. Initially the player might accept this, and as in any other game attempt to simply shoot them all. When the battle ends though, there is no reward for the merciless – instead higher rewards comes from finishing fast. Winning the battle with as little bloodshed as possible becomes a goal, and is rewarded. To me this is a beautiful twist to a game about a war.
I have been so busy with work and family that I almost forgot about this blog, but now I’m back and I will try to update regularly (or not…). I could write about attending the awesome Casual Connect conference in Seattle, or about some of the games I’m designing at the moment, but for now I just want to round of my thesis. I finished it in June and got my candidatus – or master or whatever a five year university education it is called in English. My thesis (download) is named Playful Interaction after the concept it studies:
Playful interactions require effort and reward it with growth of the brain patterns (cognitive structures, mental models, schemas etc.) associated with the applied dexterous, mental and social skills.
Playful interactions are sources of emotion potentially making the user feel, for example, stimulated, challenged, curious, proud, frustrated, confused or sad.
I split the concept into three main categories that can be applied to different parts of a game:
Playful selection (adding game mechanics or extra activities to menus) trains player’s skill in using the game’s game mechanics, inspires curiosity and prevents boredom.
Playful activation (mini-games and control challenges) removes trivial interactions at a low level and enriches the game with new game mechanics or new uses of existing mechanics. Also keeps the player attention high.
Playful guidance (providing help through discovery and challenge) provides help when and where it is needed and lets the player figure it out herself. Also, instructions are received when in a positive mood.
The main goal of playful interaction is simply to strengthen the user experience by doing things a little differently. The enjoyment and pleasure of playing a game comes from the way in which it slowly grows the patterns in our mind, and adding little mental, dexterous or social challenges to the parts of the game that is usually not very game-like (like menus, activation actions and guidance sequences) can expand this pleasure to new parts of the game. The central game mechanics might be the most important, but the rest of the package need not be boring either.
In the paper I wrote last year for the CHI workshop on user experience in games, I argued that bad usability can be a good thing if it is bad for the right reasons. An example could be the horse in Sony’s renowned Shadow of The Colossus; when the player is riding the horse, the controls are unresponsive and certainly not effective in the traditional usability sense. The designers’ reason to do this could be two-fold: First, it makes the horse feel alive and real – not even a dressage horse responds mechanically to its rider’s commands. Second, it frustrates the player into being annoyed with the horse, and perhaps even into whipping it repeatedly – imagine the guilt or remorse felt, when late in the game, your only companion, the horse, sacrifices itself to save you. That is a strong experience for a game to create, and it does so through bad usability (and nice directing). I do not know if this was Fumito Ueda’s intention, but for me it was the result.
My own current design approach is to create a list of intended emotional effects and try to build my design around that. More on this later.